Hotels near Comedy Theatre

6 Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN
Nearest Tube: Leicester Square / Piccadilly Circus

Atmospherically located just off Leicester Square by the Tkts booth at the south end of the square, this playhouse is slightly mis-named in that large-scale musicals and dramatic works often share the limelight with raucous comedy here, but it still offers a consistently excellent programme and tons of heritage.

It opened as the Royal Comedy Theatre in 1881, quickly dropping the regal seal when the owners were reminded that nobody at nearby Buck Palace had given them the right to do so, and almost as quickly established a niche for popular comic operettas. Light revue shows became the Comedy's stock-in-trade during and after WWI, and the theatre was instrumental in the abolition of censorship in the 1950s, one of a number of West End venues who fought to over-turn a centuries-old law requiring scripts to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain's Office before productions could be staged.

The theatre chalked up a landmark with the West End premiere of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1979, one of the most successful British musicals not produced by Andrew Lloyd-Webber or Cameron Mackintosh, and latterly the Comedy became synonymous with the name of Harold Pinter, many of whose pitch-black abstract comedies were presented at this venue.

Recent big productions have been the kind of slick, knockabout farces you'd expect to find here - Michael Frayn's Donkeys Years, and the revival of the 1960s smash hit Boeing-Boeing in 2007, which was nominated for two Olivier Awards. Currently Lloyd-Webber's Sunset Boulevard is playing, and a visit to the Comedy is a chance to see a basically unchanged late 19th century West End theatre in operation, one of only a handful of interiors in the city that remains virtually unchanged since it was first built.

After the show, if you wander across the road into the Tom Cribb - a traditional London boozer named after a champion bare-knuckle boxer - you're likely to find the cast discussing the night's performance over terrific pints of real ale.

Our most popular tried and tested 3 star hotel in the West End of London. The St Giles is only a short walk away from the Comedy Theatre